From idea to paying customer

Before I wrote a single line of code I had spent a week talking to potential customers and even before that I had spent a week doing customer research and identifying potential ideas that I wanted to work on.

This sounds like a great approach to any startup / for-profit project that easily goes overlooked. However, I guess most people will still get stuck at this point:

I had built a relationship with other open source projects so I knew where my early customers was going to be.

Background: I have an idea that I think might be interesting for large corporations with lots of retail customers, specifically mobile service providers, ISPs,... However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time. It'd probably be more of a consulting-style gig than a startup initially, since it'd need to be heavily tailored for each of those giant idiosyncratic businesses. Any thoughts or suggestions much appreciated.

Anyway, thanks for sharing, OP!

- The API would then redirect them to a blank white page with the words “Syncing in progress”

- I would frantically run a script in the background that actually trigger the sync locally ( I had to do a manual sync locally because I was using nextjs and hosting on vercel which didn’t support background jobs)

- I would then make small talk to distract them on how long it would take

- Once it was finished I sent them the link of the page that was finished along with DNS instructions to set up subdomain forwarding

Love this so much.

The irony is that SO much enterprise software is basically this, and there having the person on the line is sold as a benefit!

This is interesting to see, and reminds me that I really have no idea how to sell myself. I spent 7 years on this exact thing--a project to archive a community Slack server to a crawlable website, even with full-text search that (IMO) worked better than Slack search. I made the code available for other communities to use, and never once considered that this was a sellable product. I shut it down this year after a flurry of folks started asking to be opted out of the archive.

In case you want to run your own: https://github.com/zacstewart/tech404logs

4-5 weeks coding and polishing up the onboarding process and getting payments ready

I don't know when Linen was first created, but these days you can get most of this done much more rapidly.

Check out Laravel Spark[1], for example, where all of that billing stuff is neatly abstracted away so you can focus on your product

[1]: https://spark.laravel.com/

I had to do a manual sync locally because I was using Nextjs and hosting on Vercel which didn’t support long running jobs.

Finally if they were ready to pay I would send them a Stripe checkout page for payment and I would then update a field in the database manually of whether the user was a paid user.

I could have spent 4-5 weeks coding and polishing up the onboarding process and getting payments ready

Just use Rails...